In 2008, it was reported that one domestic worker a week dies in Lebanon. This number has since doubled. The majority of these deaths occur by women falling off of balconies, in which case it is often unclear whether they are the result of failed attempts at escape, suicide, or murder. This paper considers how it has become possible that the Lebanese domestic space — the very condition of possibility for the presence of hundreds of thousands of African and Asian women who live and work in Lebanon — has become that which forecloses life itself. It analyzes the local operations of the regional migrant sponsorship system known as kafala, whereby an estimated 1 in 4 Lebanese families employ a migrant domestic worker on a full-time, live-in basis. By contrasting the experience of female domestic labor to that of male migrant labor in construction or similar industries, as in the Gulf countries, I argue that the definitive experience of the kafala system in Lebanon is that of a deeply intimate, embodied violence. Paradoxically, it is the intimate nature of domestic work itself that both enables and necessitates extremities of violence in order to consistently (re)draw the boundaries of gender, citizenship, and belonging in Lebanon. Drawing upon extended fieldwork conducted among current and former African and Asian domestic workers in Beirut, I demonstrate that the operations of the kafala system in Lebanon are structured around the dehumanizing isolation of these women such that they are reduced purely to a racialized, laboring body. When such a slave-like logic seeps into the domain of the private household, something about the society itself has surely shifted, and it is this question that we also have to think about when we think of Lebanon today.